I like the mentality of this arc. All you see these days are movies and TV shows and whatnot where sentient robots overthrow their human oppressors and take control. In this show, we see a society that developed some form of artificial intelligence, but has declined for a completely different reason. I suppose technically, Pion and Oyage weren’t designed to be sentient robots, but they didn’t try to come back and start a robot rebellion or something like that. That gets old after a while.
So I think I read somewhere that this arc seemed like a prequel to the first few episodes, and I have to agree (or maybe the show said that was the case and I just missed it). Remember that Watashi’s hair developed a life of its own after it regrew, so I highly doubt it would have just sit back and allowed itself to be cut. It definitely would have grabbed the scissors and stuff…so I guess this is an episode showing why Watashi’s hair was cut originally. And as usual, the assistant is awesome…I felt bad for him when his sword and shield were confiscated. Poor guy.